Friday night my flight to the Bay Area was a little late and I was standing in line sort of rolling my eyes in concert with the other line-standers, commiserating about how much it sucks to stand in lines and fly in planes. I was jittery because there had been three hundred or so days of rain in the last month and all I wanted to do in was eat Mexican food in California. The dude next to me asked why I was going down there.
“I’m going to a cage-dancing fishnet stocking hot tub party,” I said, all bubbly with glee. “Where there is NO RAIN. I CAN’T WAIT.”
(This guy, it turns out, happens to work for the horridly named Pleasure Zone, of course, so he was all raising his eyebrows and going “I assume you’ve heard of us?” He then started telling me all about his rockstar lifestyle and how awesome he was and how often he has parties in Vegas. He sat in the row just ahead of me and when he opened his laptop I could see that his desktop was all just pictures of him with girls in bikinis. Pretty weird for a guy wearing tapered black jeans in 2006.)
I was going down to visit my buddies at the storied ABL for their annual Chinese New Year’s party because I hadn’t seen them since July and my calendar is very quickly filling up with family-oriented travel before I leave for New Zealand. This was my only friend-oriented trip for the next five months, which is a real shame because I can think of lots of people I would like to visit this year, right off the top of my head, but what with that whole full-time job thing it’s just not happening. I was pretty determined to wring every last drop of fun out of my 72 hours in Sunnyvale, and it was with that purpose in mind that I packed all my best octopus shirts, two pairs of fishnet stockings, and some fake tattoo sleeves for the weekend. Anna had hinted at some sort of contraption she and Rob had built specifically for the party too and you know nothing says awesome like a mysterious contraption, so I had high hopes. I am happy to say they were all fulfilled and that I had a wonderful time with my gorgeous friends in their eminently party-worthy house (from which I don’t yet have the pictures…hook me up Anna!) and that I am still so tired from getting no sleep two days ago that I had to leave bellydance early tonight. That is a very good weekend, don’t you think?
Friday night we ate ridiculously huge burritos in beautiful downtown Alviso and decamped immediately into the hottub after a chocolate truffle or two to sit around and gossip. A quick perusal of some of the fruits of this past summer’s photo shoot pretty much wound up the evening, because we were going to the mall the next day and needed to save our strength.
I think it’s possible that I never go to the mall unless I am with Anna…my archives indicate that a couple of years ago we did exactly the same thing because I guess I like things the way I like them. The ostensible reason for shopping was to get me a cute skirt at Torrid, but apparently the real reason was so that Anna could get like five outfits and I could get nothing. Also so that I could find out, much to my very real dismay, that Jamba Juice no longer carries my favorite smoothie (Cranberry Craze, if you must know, no boost). We have Jamba Juice in Seattle but it’s been too cold to have smoothies for the last six months so I was unaware of this change in policy. I was so flustered by the news that I accidentally ordered something with Splenda in it and then I had to take it back because my throat started seizing up with fury and disgust and then I got flustered again about whether to get extra raspberries in place of the loathsome banana and it was super loud because we were in a food court and they didn’t have any cute skirts for me at Torrid and I got scared and wanted to go home and I fell asleep in the car on the way back. And then it was time to decorate!
Anna, powerless in the face of a 20% off coupon from Oriental Trading Company, had all sorts of awesome Chinese New Year-themed stuff and so after some dithering about whatever would we wear that evening, we got to hanging things up and putting things under tablecloths and making things look generally lovely. And then it was time to figure out what to do about the cage.
The cage. This is where it would be helpful to have a picture, a picture of the cage. Anna, are you reading? Pictures of the cage, please! Pictures of the cage that you made with your bare hands! She and Rob had the brilliant idea to utilize the twenty-foot ceiling of their entryway for the construction of a human-sized birdcage, complete with little perch, made out of climbing rope and PVC pipe and pulleys and winches and everything. The idea was that people would dress up fabulously and get in the cage down on the first floor and then be hauled up by people on the second floor and then hang in the birdcage and get pictures taken of them and stun the other partygoers with the general amazing idea of having a human-sized birdcage right in the entry way to your house. Anna has a very clear vision and feels no need to explain her art to ordinary humans but she doesn’t need to because her ideas are so great (a human-sized birdcage! Right in your house!) that everyone loves them. At first I’d thought it was going to be a cagedancing kind of a situation, hence my bragging in the plane line, but it was much more subtle and subversive than that. Plus we found out you could do all sorts of acrobatics on the perch in the cage and then there was the fun of winching it up and winching it down and it was all very exciting.
I was a little trepidatious about what to wear to this party. I mean, I had the fishnets so that was okay, but what else do you wear to a party with a cage? After quite a bit of fretting I settled on a raffishly torn raspberry-colored corset that had bat-wing attachments, the aforementioned fishnets, and some sort of ruffly things on the bottom. And heels. I ruined the sort of awesome burlesque-meets-Night-On-Doom-Mountain look I had going by forgetting to put on lipstick and also by having really sucky hair, but the cage will brook no argument so in it I went, sucky hair and all. It was pretty cool. I couldn’t do any acrobatics because of the wings but it was still fun to hang out there and talk to people and generally feel like a superstar. I hope the pictures came out. (Anna, seriously. Girl, email me).
After cage time was over I had the brilliant idea to spend the rest of the party being comfortable so I got to change into a lovely outfit of Anna’s I’ve coveted since about 1996, a sort of loose-flowy-pants-under-long-tunic-with-Mandarin-collar type of arrangement that was very pretty and way less revealing than what I’d been wearing previously. That’s why I love the ABL though, I have to say. Normally I keep pretty covered up and would be too shy and too hateful of my body to pose for pictures in a corset and rufflies, but the ABL makes me feel really hot so it’s not even a thing. Still, though. Parties are more fun when you can lounge around in what are basically very fancy pajamas.
All sorts of people that I really like started showing up, like my fantastic fiancés Dave and Chrysa, both of whom looked so fierce that I nearly fainted when they came in. We spent a long time talking about how awesome we all are, basically, and then Dave had to leave and Chrysa set up body-painting camp (she gave me some flowers all down my arms that matched my fancy pajamas) and I took a turn behind the full wet bar, where I could see both the bodypainting andthe cage.
Fortunately my lovely new friend Jen whom I met over the summer was nearby so she could help me with hard questions like “Could I have a shot of tequila, please?” I don’t drink, so why I was behind the bar I don’t know, unless it was to give a lecture on Cephalopod News Of 2005: It Was A Very Exciting Year, Between The Giant Squid and the Octopus Pretending To Be A Coconut. That’s why people go to bars, I’m sure. It was fun to talk to everyone and I just lobbed all the actual drink-mixing on Jen (“Um, what’s a gin and tonic made of?”) and got to do all the fun flirty parts of being a bartender. I got to have several very cool conversations with some very cool people and all the bodypainting looked fabulous plus there were pork hombow on the snack table, so, you know, very good party.
We managed to fit, somehow, about a dozen people in the hot tub at the end of the night and that was great, and then someone came up with the brilliant idea of sitting around this crazy fur rug they have in the downstairs part of the house and just pretending it was a hot tub. A fur tub, if you will. I promise you that was really hilarious at the time. And then it was five in the morning and time for bed, and then it was eight in the morning and I was, for some reason, awake again, and that’s when I realized it’s a really good thing that I live two states away from the ABL because I just can’t live like that all the time.
There was no going back to sleep for me because I am genetically engineered to be stupidly wide awake whenever there is any sun in the vicinity so I found the shower and cursed to myself softly as I tried to remember what order shampoo and conditioner go in. Completely sober, mind you. I located the kitchen, which had Shannon in it, who was making bacon for breakfast, so I got to sit and talk with her for a while before shuffling outside for a walk in my pajamas with Anna. We stopped at Dave and Chrysa’s house for a very wonderfully gay birthday party for a couple of minutes, and then it was time to be sad because I had to go home to the cold and the dark and the rain, where I just wear jeans and a tee shirt most of the time and where not only is there no human-sized birdcage in the house, there’s not even a hot tub, no matter how often I ask for one.
I love trips like these, that are all about hanging out with my awesomely silly and prone-to-overengineering friends, where I get to spend a lot of time talking with interesting and beautiful people and eating delicious food and simmering gently in the hot tub. It hit me pretty hard when I was on the flight home that those simple, necessary pleasures are going to be very difficult, even painful, to leave this summer. I know I should have saved the plane fare towards the trip but I guess some things are too ultimately satisfying to be rational about.